群れリレー：分散型自己修復の地上・空中通信チェーン
Swarm Relays: Distributed Self-Healing Ground-and-Air Connectivity Chains
ロボット群が複雑な環境で通信を維持しながら移動するため、地上ロボットと飛行ロボットを組み合わせた通信チェーンを自律構築し、故障時にも自己修復する軽量アルゴリズムを提案・実機検証した。
著者: Vivek Shankar Varadharajan, David St-Onge, Bram Adams, Giovanni Beltrame
分類: cs.RO
原文アブストラクト
The coordination of robot swarms - large decentralized teams of robots - generally relies on robust and efficient inter-robot communication. Maintaining communication between robots is particularly challenging in field deployments. Unstructured environments, limited computational resources, low bandwidth, and robot failures all contribute to the complexity of connectivity maintenance. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight algorithm to navigate a group of robots in complex environments while maintaining connectivity by building a chain of robots. The algorithm is robust to single robot failures and can heal broken communication links. The algorithm works in 3D environments: when a region is unreachable by wheeled robots, the chain is extended with flying robots. We test the performance of the algorithm using up to 100 robots in a physics-based simulator with three mazes and different robot failure scenarios. We then validate the algorithm with physical platforms: 7 wheeled robots and 6 flying ones, in homogeneous and heterogeneous scenarios.
